Shades of Pleasure by Renee M Charles

**All royalties on this title will be donated to Catkins Animal Rescue in Park Falls, Wisconsin, in memory of the author, A.R. Morlan.**

These eight erotic tales from the ever-inventive Renée M. Charles look at sexuality through a futuristic lens. Each steamy story presents its own vision of the future, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and frequently politically charged: one story takes place in a world where heterosexuals are a minority and politicians give their constituents a hands-on demonstration of their commitment to pleasing the people; another features a pair of hermaphrodites, having struggled to fit in in Earth society, finding a place making a very intimate form of first contact with newly-discovered alien species; in a third, a girl becomes a nude model (and more) for an artistically-inclined older woman in a future where all “obscenity” is banned. Sexy, imaginative, and often pointed, these stories provide a variety of unique shades of pleasure, with erotic encounters involving women, men, and everything in between.

This collection contains the following stories: Color of Pain, Shade of Pleasure; Genus Olisbos; The Delectation Debates; Diving Into Oceans of Air; Like a Reflection in a Mirror Without Glass; Dragon Chains; Rubbing Magic’s Lantern; Nudes Ascending a Staircase.

Renee M. Charles’s fiction—both under her own name and her hard-core erotica-only Renee pen name—has either appeared in or is scheduled to appear in over 130 magazines and anthologies, including BEST AMERICAN EROTICA, THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY & HORROR 1991, 1993 & 1994, F&SF, FULL SPECTRUM IV, THE ULTIMATE ZOMBIE, THE HOT BLOOD SERIES, LOVE IN VEIN, GRUE, 2 AM, TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE and many, many others. Her non-fiction has appeared in OMNI, SPACE & TIME, WRITER’S DIGEST, CEMETERY DANCE, TWILIGHT ZONE and THE HORROR SHOW. Her erotic short stories have appeared previously in several Circlet anthologies. She also has two novels published by Bantam Books and reprinted by Borgo Press, THE AMULET and DARK JOURNEY. She lives in the Midwest, with a houseful (literally) of cats, some of whom have appeared in her novels and short fiction.

Hot excerpt under the cut…

Excerpted from Color of Pain, Shade of Pleasure

Without even needing to see the face—so artfully covered by the sharkskin-covered brank—I immediately knew that the woman who knelt before me had to be Orlina La Roux. Her neck was secured to the stainless steel whipping post by a velvet-padded joug whose long, snaking chain was draped lightly across her welt-streaked bare white back. This was Orlina of the insatiable appetite for pain, and still more pain, of the most exquisitely exotic sort. While her hair alone might have been a giveaway (so luxuriously thick, so richly highlighted with strands of glistening gold among the henna and russet), it was the sight of that fine-fleshed, creamy pale back, with its remaining deep pink shadows of former welt-marks that was unmistakable. Had I not placed each of those crisscrossing blemishes there myself?

Yet, she was already writhing in place with anticipation of my latest laying-on of the knot and spike-ended thin-curling whips, even as I languidly cracked the flailing strands against the doorway, to shake off the excess water from their over-night soak (what liquid does to the leather can be excruciatingly pleasurable). As I approached her, the spiked heels and small rounded toe-pads of my shoes clicking on the polished white tile like finger-snaps, I saw Orlina’s small, taut-nippled breasts rise and fall in rhythm with her sharply accentuated breaths.
My most frequent customer obviously couldn’t wait for the stinging caress of my dripping whip, so, of course, I made her wait all the longer for that sinuous, if brief, embrace. From its usual spot on my table of tactile toys, I picked up the small, brushlike device (which I’d fashioned myself), affectionately dubbed “The Teaser” by some of my more verbal customers, and I gently tapped the business end of the brush against my open palm. The Teaser was studded with dozens of nettle-fine spiked balls, each loosely attached to the cured-oak base, and I reflexively winced before saying “Have we been waiting long—as if I couldn’t see that you want it,” and giving her the first disciplinary swacks of the Teaser across her rounded bare bottom, then following that with lighter, but nonetheless steady smacks of the instrument on her bowed shoulders, the sides of her jutting breasts, her taut thighs, even the top of her closely-sheared mons. And with each stinging kiss of the Teaser, her wide grey eyes would glisten momentarily with the crystal shimmer of unshed tears, even as her pupils dilated with unmistakable pleasure, then contracted when the last fleshy echo of the pain died down. And between the secure straps of the brank, which held the molded cock-shaped insert deep in her mouth and prevented her from crying out or even speaking, I could see her lips purse against the tight-pressing straps, as if she were kissing the very air with each downward arc of the Teaser.
Once her milky-light skin was mottled, ruddy pinkish-mauve, I lifted her up by the strap attached to the outside of her brank, and motioned for her to grasp the smooth, tall sleekness of the whipping post until the top of her skull was touching the post and spread her legs for balance. I told her “You haven’t squirmed nearly enough. I want to hear you moan behind that prick between your teeth. I need to hear you beg for more and more until my arm burns from within… you filthy little slut. The sight of you sickens me, you groveling, simpering pasty bitch. You need to bleed a little—”

And, true to our thrice-weekly (at the least) scenario, Orlina began writhing in place against the post, whimpering behind the stubby penile gag, and grasping the chrome pole before her claw-like, anxious fingers… until the first whistling arc of the knot-ended thongs slapped against her flesh. She jerked forward, even as she then arched her back toward me, anticipating the next stinging swipe of my mane of soaked leather and tightly-knotted tips. With each criss-crossing, branding slap of my whip, she let out deeper and throatier moans of unmistakable pleasure, such an intense, orgasmic noise I felt myself grow slippery-damp along my shaven, leather-encased crotch. As the first razor-fine welts began to run dribbling red across her shoulders and upper ribcage, I let my eyes wander upward, to where her hands grasped the pole… for safewords aren’t so easy to hear through a brank’s mouth-filling insert, but hand-signals are quite easy to catch, provided one doesn’t get too carried away.

But tonight (or what passed for night on this space-station’s ever-circling rotation around the moon), Orlina’s right hand didn’t form her usual “OK” sign (thumb and forefinger in a circle, other fingers splayed out stiffly) of submission and retreat. The thread-fine dribbles of blood coursed down her silky-fine flesh in DNA-spirals, dripping runnels which pooled slightly at the curving swell of her melon-like buttocks. I wondered if, in my own state of sexual arousal, I’d somehow missed the signal to stop. The “rules” for each encounter were implicit, rather than explicit—no mistress or master was to stop whatever s/he was doing to a client unless the “safe” word or signal was given, so, short of flaying a customer to death (and given our advanced technology, even death can be a most temporary thing), none of us usually stopped unless our own hearts seized up from the effort of inflicting that desired pain/pleasure on our demanding customers.

Orlina La Roux’s blood now ran across the rounded curves of her buttocks, and into the crack between her pink-mottled cheeks, and still there was no indication for me to stop my leathery pummeling of her now cross-hatched back.

“You’ve punished me, little wretch,” I lied, as I loudly massaged my leather-encased upper arm, before closing the distance between us in three snapping strides and unfastening her brank, then all but ripping it from her head. When her face was turned in my direction, her mouth was wrinkled in a moue of disappointment, and her eyes—initially unfocused with a haze of pain/pleasure— soon were fixed on me with a steely blaze of anger.

“I didn’t give you the signal,” she hissed through her even, pale ecru teeth. “I didn’t see all the colors, all the new shapes—” before placing an open-palmed hand across her mouth, and backing as far away from me as the chain securing the joug around her neck to the pole would allow.

I stopped massaging my arm long enough to ask, “Colors? Shapes? Is there something going on that I’ve been… missing?”

Having been a Space Services Mistress for almost ten years, I didn’t think that there was any S/M or B/D practice—or resulting gratification—I hadn’t already experienced.

La Roux stood with her head bowed, so that her russet mane slid over her blushing face like opaque curtains. I gathered up bunches of her hair in each hand, and yanked them aside to reveal her pale oval of a face, admonishing her, “Now, now, no secrets from your mistress… I do all, and I have to know all.”
“The colors… the ones I see when you inflict pain on me. Different ones for each type of torture… and when it gets intense, the colors, they’re… they’re incredible. Almost unworldly, like galaxies intermingling… so much more intense than just an ordinary orgasm—”

Curling her hanks of hair around my hands, so that they formed, huge curls of either side of her flushed, but wan face, I said, “Oh, like what you see when you press the orbs of your eyes, and those patterns of light and color form on your inner eyelids—”
Shaking her head (albeit slightly, under the pressure of my hands pinning back her hair), she insisted “No, not at all. These are colors hovering right before my face, like a veil of moving, shifting color. Then, when the pleasure hits me, the colors take on different shapes, forms I can actually feel pressing against my cheeks, my lips, my nose. The shapes, they grow more varied with each new expression of pain… but I need to keep it going long enough to remember what I’m seeing and feeling—”

I loosened my grip on her hair as realization set in for me: Orlina La Roux was blessed with synesthesia, able, through a sensory mix-up, to mingle heretofore seemingly incompatible sensory impressions into something new, something tantalizingly pleasurable. In fact, one of the other mistresses who worked the Sex Shop here on the station could “taste” colors (she claimed that the sight of blood was sweeter than chocolate), but the implications of being able to see one’s own pleasure and pain were intoxicatingly heady, even for a person as sated by mock-sadism and jaded by the sight of writhing, panting “slaves” as I’d become over the years.

And the sight of Orlina’s visually-aided orgasms did make me wet at the core.

by Renée M Charles**All royalties will be donated to Catkins Rescue in Park Falls, Wisconsin, in memory of author Renee M. Charles, aka A.R. Morlan.**These eight sizzling tales from the ever-inventive Renée M. Charles look at sexuality through a futuristic lens, each with its own vision of the future--good or bad. In these stories, people--women, men, and everything in between--have erotic encounters in zero gravity, in repressive dystopian societies, and even in worlds not so far off from our own.